Americans are upset. They’re angry. They are calling it a crisis, demanding investigations of oil companies and threatening to punish politicians at the polls for the high cost of gasoline.And politicians are responding. Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are throwing out various proposals to encourage bicycle commuting and to fund research of alternate […]

Paul Rusesabagina has stared down the forces of death. He has denied the reaper. He stood up to evil alone while the rest of the world turned its back.When he speaks about genocide, we should all listen.Rusesabagina is best known in the United States from the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” which dramatized his efforts to save […]

By Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren,Cato Institute The recent spike in gasoline prices has set off a stampede of politicos demanding that hammer and tong be applied to that all-purpose bogeyman, “Big Oil.” Egged on by the red-faced anger served up by rant-and-rave TV populists, Congress may prove unable to resist passing a windfall […]

Turn either way off Route 4 onto Route 117 in Turner, and you’ll find the same thing: rutted, crumbling, cracked roadway.In some places, the state-maintained road – we use the term loosely – is astonishingly bad. If you laid a straight edge from the berm to the crown in some places, you’d see four inches […]

Perhaps, it seems, the Allagash Wilderness Waterway is destined to become just a long, skinny state park, complete with parking lots and bathhouses.We hope not, and we think most Mainers would be aghast at the idea.Yet, while attention was focused on adding the Katahdin Lake area to Baxter State Park, a bad bill sweeping aside […]

Police will probably never know for sure why a car carrying four Ashland sisters drifted into the opposite lane April 17 and struck a loaded logging truck. All four sisters, ranging in age from three to 16, died in the tragedy.But the odds are that driver distraction played a role.A government study released last week […]

Ending the town meeting style of government in Rumford is a disappointing idea.The reasons the citizens in Rumford are upset over the state of affairs with the town’s budget are the very reasons why the town needs, more than ever, an open public meeting to air things out.Face-to-face, person-to-person communication is the way government’s been […]

By Bogdan Kipling,Knight Ridder News Service WASHINGTON – If you like the Theater of the Absurd, the latest effort to control the United States’ borders by the Department of Homeland Security rivals the best offerings by Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco.Under a U.S. law that will kick in Jan. 1, 2008, millions of Canadians and […]

At first, it just seems like perplexing mystery: Why do Lewiston and Auburn families generate nearly twice as much garbage as those in Portland? It’s true, according to the state of Maine: Lewiston and Auburn residents dispose of about 740 pounds per person per year, while Portland residents produce a little more than 400 pounds […]

Lewiston public works crews were in Kennedy Park this week, closing off the basketball courts and preparing the Park and Spruce streets corner for a new skateboard park.The city, aware that those courts are heavily used on any given night, is creating a temporary basketball court on the Pine Street side of the bath house, […]